


The Broken Hallelujah

by bachlava



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-22
Updated: 2011-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-14 23:47:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bachlava/pseuds/bachlava
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immediately after the last seal is broken, Dean answers some of Sam's questions. AU after 4x22. (Follows <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/154782">A Secret Chord</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Broken Hallelujah

**Author's Note:**

> _There's a blaze of light in every word.  
>  It doesn't matter which you heard:  
> The holy or the broken Hallelujah._  
> -Leonard Cohen, "Hallelujah"

Dean is pretty sure he's dead again – maybe in purgatory's waiting room instead of the fifth circle or something, but definitely dead. His body feels taut and brittle as a wind-smoked fish. He's aware of crisp white sheets and desperate thirst and the pain of his bones. Collateral damage: war's broken out between heaven and hell, and for all the angelic goings-on, he is, or was, still human. Ground infantry, expendable.

His next flicker of awareness contains a warm, solid form beside him. In the next bed there's a woman too curvy to be Ruby– the nurse, he thinks; he remembers Sam mentioned her. He isn't sure if any of them is alive. Later he sees her get up, wobble her way out the door without looking back. She won't be back, Dean thinks. He wonders where she's going.

Some time on, he isn't sure how much, he feels arms enfolding him. There's the swell and rhythm of a breathing chest, a heart pulsing by his ear. It's warm, and he thinks maybe it's his mother who's holding him. Maybe that means she's in hell, which is more than Dean can stand. Right now, though, he doesn't see what he can do besides stand it.

He drifts in and out of sleep for a while, and on one of the more lucid out drifts he recognizes the scars on the arm that's around him, that it's Sam's. It'd make more sense for the two of them to be in hell's ticket line, anyway. There's something he needs to say... “I'm thirsty, Sam.”

“There's water.” Sam shifts around; he's in better shape than Dean is, Dean can tell that even now. There's a ring of hard plastic pressed to his lips and then tepid water on his tongue. “Where are we?”

“Motel somewhere.”

“How'd we get here?”

“You don't remember?”

Dean tries. He's vaguely conscious of points of pain he has now, different burns and lacerations, and then he remembers: _Lucifer rose._  “Castiel was there,” Dean says. The light around him was as strong as fire.  _“The world is all suffering, but it can't end until my Father's time.”_  But he'd blazed as if to burn it all, and Dean knew: the angels dragged him out of hell and he was  _nothing_ , a mortal blip on the apocalyptic radar, maybe less.  _“They won't come after you yet. Rest and heal.”_  

This is where Cas sent them, Dean guesses. To Sam he says, “Yeah, I remember.”

There's a haze in his mind after that. He's not sure how long it lasts, but he isn't really thinking about time. He's thinking about what's coming and about how it wouldn't have happened if he'd just let Sam rest in peace two years ago. That's something he knows he never could have done. Fuck, if he had done so many things differently...

When he comes to a little bit more – he isn't sure how much later that is – he gets across that they need to talk, need to get rid of their secrets. No more hiding. He makes himself say, “Ask me whatever you want to about hell. Because right now you don't understand why you need to stay out of there.”

“I understand – ”

“No, you don't, Sam. If you did, you wouldn't have gone all demon-bloodlust in the first place, no matter what.”

“Don't bet on that. You don't know the half of what I tried to get you out.”

Dean finds out: Sam tells him. Not everything all at once, Dean knows. There are what feel like chunks of a confession over the next few days, while Dean finds out just how far Sam has gone, and how much further he'd be willing to go. 

For his own part, he tells Sam some things about hell. Not everything, because, promises aside, there are some things he wouldn't tell Sam even if he had the words for it. But he tells him some of the things he did there. And then, because Sam asks, some of how he got to that point.

Sam gets all strange when Dean tells him about it, acts like he's trying to stand in for their mother even though Dean would die of shame before he said a word of it to her. Even though Sam didn't know a damn thing about her, and when he tries to go for a soothing effect, Dean shuts him down or, if he has to, hits him. At one point he's drunk and Sam is sober, more or less, and he pins Dean against his chest for what felt like hours. He lets Dean look away, if nothing else; the humiliation of breaking down about all of it in front of Sammy isn't anything Dean wants to repeat. But he lets it slip that he'd fought like anything when Castiel showed up for him – he's not sure why he fought, anymore, or what he thought would happen, but he fought harder than he could ever remember fighting and it didn't do a damn thing.

“Good thing Cas won,” Sam murmurs, trying to sound wry.

“Yeah, good thing,” Dean agrees, forcing a smile that Sam can't see.

Sam asks him, after a while, about Castiel, about what Sam's known is happening and thinks will be the end of them, will bring down some inconceivable wrath on Dean and Cas both. Dean doesn't tell much, just repeats what Cas told him: _This is not forbidden._  He remembers some afterglow, lying in Castiel's arms, and getting an answer:  _There was a holy woman, centuries ago. And a prophet long before that. They knew something closer to my true form._  Dean asked who they were, but Castiel only said, “Their names are lost to your history.” There was something intense and crushing then; Dean couldn't place it. He wanted to escape it with anything, a joke, a ridiculous question, but he didn't speak before Cas answered, “You wouldn't have seen beauty in either of them.” 

He doesn't tell Sam about that, or how it feels when Cas lays one hand alongside Dean's face and then lowers him onto a bed as if Dean's a swooning woman.

Sam asks about the future too, when the levity runs out.  _What's going to happen to us?_  Dean shoves his hands in his pockets at that one. “I don't think we're that important as far as hell's concerned,” he says. “They've got a couple of million angels to work through before they even think about us.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I mean, I think you're right.” Sam's sitting on his bed, and he stares at his hands. “Do you think we're going to make it?”

“Alive at the end of this, you mean?” Dean doesn't need to see the nodded answer. “Honestly, Sam? Castiel helping out or not, I don't see any way we could be.”

Sam spends another minute hand-staring, and Dean doesn't interrupt him. Eventually he says, quietly, “I don't either.” He sounds – no, he  _doesn't_  sound young, but Dean hears him that way. He swallows heavily, throat dry. “There's worse things than dying, Sammy. You gotta stop making this about whether either one of us stays alive.”

Sam tries again to force a smile. “At least you've got an angel to help you to the other side, right?”

“I don't think it works like that,” Dean says. Not that Sam does either, he'd bet. “Look, what you need to be worried about is staying out of hell. You don't need to be afraid of dying.”

“Do you believe that, Dean? Really?”

Dean won't meet his brother's eyes, except for an instant. Eventually he says, “I'm trying.”

**Author's Note:**

>  _Supernatural_ is all the CW's; no claim or commerce here.
> 
>  
> 
> Image: anteka on livejournal.


End file.
